Word: wits
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Harvard's left needs to discover a sense of humor and not shrink from using caustic wit and sarcasm. It could also benefit from a more combative stance. Mockery can be an especially effective device for combating the hypocrisy or ridiculous obsessions of the right...
...talked-about woman in America. TIME Critic John Elson writes that Boothe seemingly had it all: she was a headlining journalist (for Life and the original Vanity Fair); a successful playwright (?The Women?); a two-term Congresswoman from Connecticut; and later U.S. ambassador to Italy. She had a merciless wit and stunning looks to go with her smarts. Drawing on interviews with family, friends and Luce herself, as well as her papers in the Library of Congress, ?Rage for Fame: The Ascent of Clare Boothe Luce? by Sylvia Jukes Morris (Random House; 562 pages; $30) is the first part...
...entire production was a bit too cheery for the source material, stories that critique society, relationships, wealth and pretentiousness. Not Much Fun is too kindhearted to fully recreate the sparkling wit and bitter undertones which make Parker's stories so memorable. Instead of allowing the lines in each scene to build up toward a devastatingly ironic conclusion, the show went for more regular laughs. In most scenes, this broader comic approach didn't seem to ring true with the sharp and often sarcastic dialogue...
Everyone involved in Not Much Fun should be commended for taking Parker's work seriously. Despite the stories' genuine wit and highly-charged emotional undertones, they could easily be used to mock the culture of the 1920s...
...pummeled his characters into manic, surreal, endless inventive farce; his great period (1942-46) deserves a book of its own. Jones' films were about people--all right, barnyard critters, but human withal--who endured life's vithithitudes (as Daffy would say) with amazing grace and Charlie Chaplin's physical wit...